The Mom Stop: And they call it puppy love

Lydia Seabol Avant More Content Now

Tuesday

May 29, 2018 at 9:32 AMMay 29, 2018 at 9:34 AM

I guess you can say I’ve been bitten by the “puppy bug” lately.

I’ve had a puppy exactly twice in my life. The first was when I was 10 — a miniature schnauzer that spent most of her puppyhood being dressed up in doll clothes and being rocked in a doll cradle. The second was a chocolate cocker spaniel I bought during my senior year of college, a dog who I long considered my “first child.” That dog was there with me through the end of college and graduate school, dating and break-ups, starting my first job, meeting and marrying my husband, and eventually the first dog to all three of my kids.

It was only after our cocker spaniel died and we lived in an all-too quiet house for three months after her death that we decided to adopt our oversized boxer, who is now seven. People thought I was crazy, bringing home such a large dog into a very small house when we had a 6-year-, 4-year- and a 3-month-old baby at the time.

But when you are a dog person, you are a dog person. And when a dog person doesn’t have a dog in their life, something seems lacking. It’s like missing the clackety-clack tapping of nails across the kitchen tiles, or leaning down to scoop dog food into the dog bowls only to realize the bowls have been put away; it’s the metallic clinking sound our dog’s collar would make as she lapped water out of her water bowl that left a ringing silence after she was gone.

And after we adopted our boxer Dozier, we fell in love with him and with the breed. Although 85 pounds and a little neurotically clingy, it’s hard not to love a dog that emphatically loves “his people.”

So, somehow, we found ourselves driving home from Georgia last week with an 8-week-old boxer puppy sleeping in my kids’ laps. While we prefer to adopt — I most definitely appreciated the fact that when we adopted our Dozier in 2015, he was completely house trained and new how to do tricks — I want my kids to have the experience of having a puppy, even if just for this once.

I brought my oldest two kids to Georgia to pick up the puppy and when my 9-year-old daughter saw the dog, she almost cried, she was so excited. She and my son took turns holding the puppy in her comatose-like state on our four-hour drive home. We were all smiles, imagining the bliss that there would be with a puppy in the house.

Granted, in the 16 years since I last had a puppy, I had somehow forgotten the pain that comes with housetraining. I had forgotten the razor-sharp baby teeth, the yelps and howls a puppy makes on her first few nights in a new home. I had forgotten about chewed up shoes and furniture, or the smell of puppy breath as she laid curled up on top of my head in bed. But I had also forgotten the sweetness that is a puppy “running” in her sleep; the puppy licks, the wobbly lack of gracefulness that sometimes causes young dogs to run too fast for their own feet.

I had forgotten the joy that a new dog could bring to your life.

And so, welcome to our world, Miss Maggie. Yes, our life with three kids and now two large dogs is chaotic. But, when you live with a high-level chaos, I think you get immune to it.

Sometimes that chaos is where the best in life happens.— Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News in Alabama. Reach her at lydia.seabolavant@tuscaloosanews.com.